The INVITES (Innovative Equipment for Intensified Recovery of CO2 from Flue Gases) project is conducted as part of the Polish-German cooperation for sustainable development „STAIR”.
The consortium, which includes the German company ENVIMAC, the Polish company OMNIKON and the Lodz University of Technology, has been established for the project implementation.
The project is co-financed by the National Centre for Research and Development and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research.
The objective of the INVITES project is to improve a technology to recover CO2 from flue gases and to implement it at industrial scale.
At present, in Poland 95% of energy comes from coal combustion, whereas Poland and Germany together emit 25% of the carbon dioxide produced in Europe in energy production. It is imperative to improve currently existing technologies of carbon dioxide recovery from flue gases before alternative energy production methods are sufficiently developed.
As part of INVITES project, two potentially most effective gas absorption technologies, i.e. stationary packed beds dedicated to purification of gas streams from CO2 and RPB (Rotating Packed Bed) technology, will be developed.
The research under industrial conditions, numerical computations and analyses of impact of implemented technological solutions on the environment (i.e. LCA – life cycle assessment), performed during the implementation of the INVITES project (10.2016 ÷ 09.2019), will lead to the development and optimisation of designing method of both types of equipment with potential application in the energy industry and widely-understood chemical and food sectors.
Even though the topic of rotating packed beds has been popular among researchers, as well as in chemical industry, for several decades, it is still a young and hardly optimized technology. Both the construction and the mode of operation of RPBs cause a lot of difficulties in measuring a variety of operational parameters, such as residence time or effective mass transfer area. Thus, researchers’ ability to create credible predictive models is very difficult, and sparse correlation functions are feasible for very few internal morphologies.
In traditional column processes, the efficiency of mass transfer is dictated mostly by the height of the internal (or number of mass transfer units), where the mass exchange takes place. Due to centrifugal force, in RPBs the mass transfer efficiency is analogously dependent on the radius of the rotor. Unfortunately, tension from centrifugal force also increases with the radius, which severely limits the feasible dimensions of an RPB internal. This implies that alternative paths for intensification need to be explored.
The vast majority of reported rotating packed bed processes use one of two well-researched types of internals: highly porous metal foam (monolithic internal) or wire mesh (coiled internal). Both solutions provide very high porosity while being cheap, but they are very suboptimal in terms of mass transfer, due to small interfacial areas and liquid residence times.
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